The Power of Perspectives

Yves Faguy

Immigration law

Immigration detention is a form of administrative detention, and as such should be brief. But while that may be true for a large majority of immigration cases, says Anthony Navaneelan, a lawyer with the Refugee Law Office at Legal Aid Ontario, we’re seeing more and more cases “where individuals are being detained for extremely long periods of time” under the Immigrationand Refugee Protection Act.

Navaneelan, who was part of a panel discussion on immigration detention at the CBA’s Immigration Law Conference in Toronto last week, was making the case that there should be a clear time limit on immigration detention. Unlike some other countries, Canada has not set a maximum length of time a person can be held. Navanaleen proposes that limit be set at two years.

To be fair, the Canadian government has made efforts to reduce the length of detentions in Canada. According to the Canadian Border Services Agency, the average duration in 2016-2017 was 19 days, down from 23 days in 2015-2016. The figure has dropped by 20.4 per cent over the last three years.

Patents

Blockchain, the peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology that underlies Bitcoin but which also has other uses, has everyone predicting it will revolutionize everything from banking and finance to insurance and law. That revolution, however, will play out over decades, explain Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani in the Harvard Business Review:

True blockchain-led transformation of business and government, we believe, is still many years away. That’s because blockchain is not a “disruptive” technology, which can attack a traditional business model with a lower-cost solution and overtake incumbent firms quickly. Blockchain is a foundational technology: It has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems. But while the impact will be enormous, it will take decades for blockchain to seep into our economic and social infrastructure. The process of adoption will be gradual and steady, not sudden, as waves of technological and institutional change gain momentum.

But as the Economist reported earlier this year, that hasn’t stopped battle lines from being drawn early over patenting that “foundational” technology – or at least improvements on it. Among notable companies filing patents are Amazon.com, Apple and Facebook, and the number of filings in the U.S. is tripling each year. But what makes this area of patenting particularly challenging is that open-source nature of core blockchain technology, say Paul Horbal and Brian De Vries:

Climate law

Now that the world has expressed profound regret at President Donald Trump's decision to pull the U.S out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and issued warnings that its terms are non-negotiable, it’s worth pausing to consider what it all means legally.

The most puzzling statement Trump made yesterday is that he wants “a better deal” claiming, “Believe me, we have massive legal liability if we stay in.”

Paris’s only constraint on Trump comes through intangibles like reputation and influence. It imposes absolutely no practical or legal constraint on his actions — not on trade policy, not on domestic energy policy, nothing.

That means all talk of Paris being a “bad deal” for the US, or hurting US trade, or affecting the US coal industry in any way, is nonsense. Paris does not and cannot do any of those things.

BC election

Faced with two options — resign now or face defeat on a confidence vote — BC Premier Christy Clark has made it clear that she is going the latter route. She has stated, however, that she will recall the legislature for a vote soon, and won't ask the province’s Lieutenant Governor for a new election if defeated. So far, there is little controversy surrounding her decision, at least from a legal point of view. Even or political opponents, NDP leader John Horgan and Green Party leader Andrew Weaver have acknowledged her right to have the first opportunity at forming a government.

But by forcing the vote of no confidence, is the premier not just putting off the inevitable?

Climate law

OECD countries should work to raise the cost of carbon emissions to US$100 per metric ton by 2030 to meet pledges made under the Paris Climate Agreement to keep global temperatures from rising above 2°C.

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